Danny Lloyd – the kid in The Shining: ‘I was promised that tricycle after filming but it never came’
This article is more than 8 years old
After starring alongside Jack Nicholson in the horror classic, the young actor disappeared. Now 45, he addresses the rumours about his life since retiring from acting aged 13 and recalls his time on set with extreme perfectionist Stanley Kubrick
‘Whatever happened to that kid from The Shining?” For years, horror fans pestered Stephen King about the fate of little Danny Torrance, the boy with psychic abilities who survived the Overlook Hotel. So much so that King eventually wrote a sequel, 2013’s Doctor Sleep. It’s a question that crops up on the internet too, about Danny Lloyd, the child actor with the pudding-bowl haircut who played Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation. On IMDb, Lloyd has just one other acting credit after The Shining (a long-forgotten TV drama about Watergate). Where did he disappear to? “I once read that I had six kids and was a pig farmer,” he says, chuckling on the phone from his home. “That’s not entirely accurate.”
For the record, Lloyd – who goes by Dan rather than Danny these days – is a biology professor at a community college in Kentucky. He did work on a farm to pay his way through university, “but where I’m from in the midwest, that’s where the odd jobs are, on farms”. And he’s got four children, not six – the eldest two are teenagers and tease him mercilessly about his haircut in The Shining.
Nothing about Lloyd screams Hollywood. In photos, he looks like your average 45-year-old guy, clean cut with a neatly trimmed beard. Chatting on the phone, he is pure midwestern wholesomeness, his expressions running the gamut from “oh boy” to “gosh”. Because he rarely gives interviews, gossip has swirled that he hates The Shining and feels like it’s wrecked his life. Any truth there? “I don’t do many interviews. But when I do, I try to make it clear, The Shining was a good experience. I look back on it fondly. What happened to me was I didn’t really do much else after the film. So you kind of have to lay low and live a normal life.”
In his early days as a teacher – long after he had quit acting – Lloyd learned fast that being the kid from The Shining was not a fact he needed to share with pupils looking for chinks in his authority. “It was disruptive in class, so that’s when I began to really play it down.” Were the kids waggling their fingers hissing “Redrum”? He laughs good-naturedly. “Yes. Very occasionally, but enough for me to know I had to downplay it. As a teacher, you’re supposed to be in control.”
Lloyd was four when his father, a railroad worker, heard a call-out for auditions on local radio. Kubrick had also placed adverts in Illinois newspapers: “Seeking boy for a film. Between five and seven years of age. No previous acting experience necessary.” Why did his dad think he could act? “Well, he told me that I was always running around trying to get attention, so he sent off my photo. I think he did it as a joke, really.” But, after five or six auditions he landed the role – Kubrick’s personal assistant called the house in the middle of Lloyd’s fifth birthday. (The director later said that he’d been impressed with the little boy’s ability to concentrate.)
The entire family upped sticks to London – Lloyd, his mum, dad and older brother Mike – for what they were told would be a 17-week shoot. Inevitably, filming on The Shining overran, to almost a year, as extreme perfectionist Kubrick shot take after take (he forced poor Shelley Duvall to redo the axe scene a record-breaking 127 times). “We didn’t know what we were getting into,” says Lloyd. “But I think if you were to ask each once of us individually, we’d do it again.”
At the time, aged five, he had no idea The Shining was a horror film – Kubrick decided not to tell him the plot. He thought it was drama about a family who lived in a hotel. Kubrick was an imposing presence, a big slab of a man with a reputation for being difficult and exacting. What did Lloyd make of him? “Stanley was great. I remember him playing ball with me, playing catch, stuff like that. He was a big guy with a beard, but I don’t remember ever being scared of him or intimidated or anything.”
Unlike Duvall, he has fond memories from the set: eating peanut butter sandwiches with Lisa and Louise Burns, the twins who played the creepy Grady sisters; an egg hunt Kubrick organised at Easter for the kids. And while the rest of us might remember little Danny pedalling like the wind along the corridors of the Overlook, hyperventilating in terror at the horrors of room 237, what stuck for Lloyd was the excitement of being allowed to ride a tricycle indoors. Although it came with a lesson in the hollowness of grownup promises. A crew member offered to send him the tricycle after the movie: “I was waiting and waiting for it, but it never came.”
Kubrick and his team protected him from the scary stuff, Lloyd says. In one scene, where Wendy runs screaming through the hotel with Danny in her arms, Duvall carried a lifesize doll. “I specifically remember I was banned from the set for the entire time Scatman Crothers was being axed,” he says laughing. There is something nice and Tom Hanks-y about his measured tone and efforts not to say anything mean or controversial.
I read that he accidentally walked in on Jack Nicholson filming “Here’s Johnny!” (voted the scariest scene movie history a few years ago). Is that true? “Yes, but not the actual ‘Here’s Johnny’ bit. Jack was out in the hallway with the axe. He was having fun and goofing off. I think it was a plastic axe he had. Both my parents were there and we were laughing. That wasn’t scary.”
One of his costumes, a hand-knitted Apollo 11 jumper, has provided conspiracy theorists with ammunition for their hypothesis that Kubrick filled The Shining with clues that he had helped the US government to fake the moon landing in 1969. Lloyd laughs drily when I ask if believes any of the Shinologists’s theories? “Honestly, no. I don’t think there’s any basis to any of it really. I think it’s just people being such fans of Kubrick and trying to explain some of the things that are almost unexplainable. Why did he do this? Why he did do that? But no, I don’t buy into any of the conspiracies.” For years after the film, Kubrick sent the Lloyd family cards at Christmas, and telephoned around his graduation from high school: “He was interested in how I was doing in school. It was very nice of him to take time.”
About a year after its release Lloyd was shown a 10-minute kiddie version of The Shining at a local cinema. He was 10 or 11 before he finally saw the real deal. Did it scare him? “No. For me when I watch The Shining, it’s like watching a home movie. I understand how it scares people. I think it’s an entertaining movie, don’t get me wrong. But I look back on it with so many memories.” These days he prefers watching documentaries to horror films.
So what happened after The Shining? Where did he go? Lloyd continued to audition for roles “but with no success really”. He finally quit when he was 13 or 14. Did he find the rejection upsetting? “No, I wouldn’t say it was upsetting. I always enjoyed it. It was exciting. But as I got a little bit older, it got kind of boring. Then I had to tell my parents that I was ready to quit. Which they were fine with. They were never stage parents. They made sure I had a normal upbringing.”
I wonder if things might have turned out different today? The breakout child stars from Stranger Things have been plastered over magazines, already joining the celebrity hoopla. “I think that’s entirely possible. But I’m quite happy with how things went, really. I feel like I pretty much hit the lottery with the The Shining. I have seen those kids from Stranger Things. That popularity must be dizzying for ’em.”
So, no regrets? “No. I don’t regret trying acting. When I decided to stop, I don’t regret that either. At the end of the day, it’s not a huge deal. Well, it is and it isn’t. I still have to grade the tests at school, get the kids to bed. All the regular stuff.”
The Shining is in cinemas across the UK on 31 October accompanied by short film Work & Play: A Short Film About The Shining directed by Matt Wells.
- Which Temptation Island Couples Are Still Together and Where Are They Now?“I’ve run into her at Costco, and we don’t say anything to each other.” By Olivia HarrisonNov. 26, 2025
After enduring plenty of trouble in paradise — plus multiple shared showers, tearful heart-to-hearts, and, yes, even a threesome — the four couples who traveled to Temptation Islandnow have their answer to the question, “Is this relationship built to last?”
By the end of the new season, two of the original couples left the island together and two went their separate ways. But the drama has only heated up since the final bonfire, mediated by host Mark L. Walberg, as the entanglements (emotional and otherwise) among the group have somehow gotten even messier. So, who’s still together, what have they learned from the experiment, and which love triangle continued long after filming ended?
Solve word, logic, and visual puzzles based on Stranger Things
To find out, keep reading as the Temptation Island couples and singles unpack all their relationship baggage and share updates about where they stand today.
THE COUPLES
Alexa and Lino
STATUS: ENGAGED
Alexa and Lino’s time on Temptation Island proved that getaways bring them closer together. The happy couple is planning their dream destination wedding in Sorrento, Italy, for the fall of next year. For the foreseeable future, Alexa will be sweating about the wedding details while also completing her nurse practitioner’s program, but the two aren’t worried about a jam-packed schedule. After Temptation Island, they know that whatever challenges arise, they always have each other’s backs. “Lino and I are a team,” Alexa says. “Every single word that we were both saying throughout the [experiment], we were thinking of the other person.”
The two made sure to get on the same page after filming ended to debrief on the highs and lows of their experience. “We did a little three-day vacation together in Hawaii with no phones, and we discussed everything,” she shares. “There was nothing for us to hide. Because we had that time together to lay everything out, our communication got better.” They’ve used those new-found communication skills to navigate some familiar challenges since leaving the island. Recently, the couple moved yet again for Alexa’s job, but this time, Lino had no qualms about it. They have come up with a clear plan for the future that serves them both. “I have entrepreneurial aspirations that align with Alexa,” Lino says. Once she finishes school and the two tie the knot, they’ll finally move one last time back home to Florida, where they can be close to family and open a clinic together.
As much as this experience cemented Alexa and Lino’s commitment — he describes their relationship as “indestructible” — it also showed them the importance of focusing on individual growth. On the island, Lino picked up the habit of keeping a daily journal, which helps him stay positive and affirm himself, and Alexa learned to trust her gut, which in turn led to a “sense of peace” she didn’t have before.
Shanté and Brion
STATUS: NOT TOGETHER
After leaving Temptation Island together, Shanté and Brion stayed up all night talking about the experience, which Shanté said gave them both a sense of closure at the time. “I don’t think we’d ever talked that much nonstop before,” she told Tudum. Shanté admitted that she wished it hadn’t taken a threesome with other women for Brion to realize what he really wanted. “As sad as it is and as annoying as it is, I don’t know that we would’ve had those conversations if that didn’t happen,” she added. “We could have just been down this bad spiral of not really knowing how each other feels.”
Shanté knows that people will have a lot of opinions about her decision to leave Temptation Island with Brion. But given their history, she was willing to hear him out instead of automatically judging his behavior. For Brion, the wild night gave him “clarity” about the kind of partner he wants to be moving forward. “I regret what I did, but I’ve grown up a lot,” he told Tudum ahead of the season’s launch. Going straight from the world of college basketball into a corporate job, Brion said Temptation Island was his first ever opportunity to do some serious self-reflection. “I even cried talking about how I grew up — something I hadn’t thought about in forever,” he explained. “It was a big learning experience for me to really see the value of the woman that I have.” Shanté, who also doesn’t open up easily, credited the experience for pushing her to share how she’s feeling.
After the launch of Temptation Island, Shanté and Brion appeared to be a rock-solid couple, but on April 7 she announced via Instagram that the two had chosen to end their relationship. “After much thought and reflection, Brion and I have decided to part ways for now. There is no bad blood — just two people recognizing that we need time and space to process this journey,” she wrote. “I wish Brion nothing but the best, and I hope we’re both able to grow from this experience.”
Want to hear more from Brion and Shanté? Listen to the We Have the Receipts podcast below to hear the couple reflect on their regrets and lessons learned since leaving the island.
Tyler
STATUS: IN A RELATIONSHIP
Tyler is currently in a committed relationship — just not with his original partner, Tayler, or Kay, the woman with whom he left Temptation Island. From the beginning of the experiment, he was hot and heavy with Kay, but the two realized their lives didn’t align during a conversation on their last date. Still, heading into the final bonfire, Tyler says he chose to leave the island with Kay because they had formed such a strong bond.
While he hasn’t seen Kay since filming ended, Tyler has run into Tayler quite a few times. About a week after returning to Nashville, he saw her at the gym, which led to an emotional hours-long conversation about their experience, including the incendiary clips of Tayler saying bad things about him at the bonfire. “She definitely just went personal and overshared,” Tyler says. Tayler apologized for her now-infamous “bitch tendencies” comment but explained that she wanted to be honest about their issues. Tyler says the two discussed a possible reconciliation, but he knew he was “not in a place to do that.” Two months later, after hearing that he had started dating someone else, Tyler claims Tayler reached out to ask why he wouldn’t give their relationship another chance. “It was hard to navigate,” he says. “We haven’t talked since that phone call. I’ve run into her at Costco, and we don’t say anything to each other.”
Soon after Tyler returned home, a friend introduced him to a woman named Lauren, and they hit it off. He credits the success of his current relationship to Temptation Island, which pushed him to know himself better. “It’s been fun to talk openly about all that personal growth with Lauren,” he says. Moving forward, Tyler has “strong intentions” for his future with his new romantic partner. He also has big plans for his career, having recently signed with a modeling agency.
Tayler
STATUS: SINGLE
Looking back, Tayler doesn’t have any regrets about Temptation Island, including her comments about her then-boyfriend, Tyler. “I probably shouldn’t have said bitch tendencies but at the end of the day, I’m going to call it like I see it,” she tells Tudum. Tayler was there to address the problems in her relationship with Tyler — who, she maintains, hadn’t worked for a year and wasn’t contributing financially — and in order to do that, she needed to be honest. “I did not say anything to make him purposefully look bad,” she says. “We had issues, so I was not going to lie to everybody around me that everything was hunky-dory.” While Tayler accepts that some of her comments may have hit below the belt, she doesn’t think they excuse Tyler cheating on her with Kay.
After their first conversation following that gym run-in, there was an additional phone call about possibly getting back together — “I literally have screenshots of all of this, because I know how this man is,” she says. Tyler was very emotional on the call and said that they would have to go to couples counseling in order for a reconciliation to work. That’s why she was shocked to learn through a mutual friend that Tyler had just gotten back from a trip with his now-girlfriend at the time. “It was just the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. “So I blocked him and never looked back, and we have not spoken since.”
Once she finally set a firm boundary, Tayler spent the next six months showing up for herself and not dating. She’s now in therapy to continue working through her abandonment issues, which she says Temptation Island brought to the surface. After everything that’s happened, Tayler is approaching the possibility of commitment with caution. “I [still need] the time and the space to continue to heal,” she says. “Choosing myself, I’ll never lose.”
Ashley
STATUS: SINGLE
“We got back together for a little bit,” Ashley tells Tudum about Grant. “That was a shit show.” The former couple’s romantic roller coaster took off once again due to Grant’s persistence, says Ashley, who didn’t speak to him for months following their time on the island. Then, out of nowhere, Grant popped back up in her life. “I just ran into him out at the bar literally next to my house, and it just went downhill from there,” she says. “He told me that he had been going out to all the places trying to run into me.” Ashley learned that, after leaving the island alone, Grant began exclusively dating Natalie — the single he connected with in the experiment. But he still chose to pursue Ashley, and they went onto date for two months. “He cheated on Natalie with me,” Ashley admits, sharing that their not-so-coincidental encounter occurred while Grant was still entangled with Natalie.
“I will give him credit. He did everything he could to try to fix it,” says Ashley. “But there just really wasn’t any coming back from everything that happened. I just couldn’t let it go, and I was never going to believe or trust that he really was going to change.”
Moving forward, Ashley isn’t opposed to dating, but it’s not a priority. “I was single for a very long time before Grant, and I was very OK with it.” That said, her time on the island taught her a valuable lesson about her approach to relationships. “I really need to pay attention to people’s words and actions aligning, and I don’t need to give someone a million chances just because they beg for it.” As for where she stands with Danny, the man with whom she left the island, they’ve settled into a friendship. “We talked for a little bit, but it just fizzled out,” says Ashley. “We live very different lifestyles, and we kind of knew that going in. I was more just trying to stay away from Grant.”
But Danny wasn’t the only single who caught Ashley’s eye. “There were tiny things about Logan that kind of reminded me of Grant, so I slowly drifted toward Danny, because he felt so safe,” she says. In the outside world, though, she’s gotten to know Logan’s “sweet” and “innocent” nature. “I still talk to Logan,” Ashley reveals. “I don’t know that anything will come of that, but I do think he’s a little cutie, so I still flirt with him.”
Grant
STATUS: SINGLE
“I left the island alone, and I’m alone,” Grant says of his life after Temptation Island. “I’m single, working on myself.” While he stayed relatively tight-lipped on the details of his post-experiment relationships, Grant is no longer attached to Ashley, his original partner, or Natalie, the woman he hit if off with on the island. After witnessing Ashley talk trash about him in the bonfire clips, he’s prioritizing his peace. “In real life, I didn’t know how she was talking about me to other people,” Grant says. “Hearing her talk bad[ly] about things she and I had talked privately about and made goals to further develop in our relationship sucked.”
Being around women who he felt were very different from Ashley made Grant rethink their commitment to one another. “Meeting these other girls who were so soft and nice really just stuck it to me that that’s what I need in a partner,” he says. For the record, Grant says he was only open to the idea of kissing Natalie because he was trying to force himself to get over Ashley. “It was kind of my way of letting go,” he says. “At the same time, I didn’t want Natalie to feel like a rebound. That girl is incredible. She’s like the softest, sweetest person I’ve probably ever met, so I wanted to make sure that she felt cared about, too.”
Grant’s Temptation Island experience was filled with “confusion,” and he admits he could have taken more time before getting physical with Natalie, especially for Ashley’s sake. “I think I was very unaligned with my soul. I was so distracted and overwhelmed that my decisions at the time weren’t extremely thought-out,” he admits. “I still feel like I was being my wholehearted self, so I don’t regret anything besides Ashley having to watch.”
THE SINGLES
Kay
STATUS: SINGLE
After her final overnight date with Tyler on the island, Kay says it was pretty clear that the two wouldn’t date. For starters, Kay wanted Tyler to experience single life instead of jumping right into another relationship. While there’s no denying they connected on a deep level, Kay’s not convinced anything more than a friendship would have developed between them had they met off the island. “We were put in such a romantic setting. That’s why it became romantic,” she says. “We both still look back at it as a great experience. I think he’s such a good guy, but I don’t think he’s my guy.”
A few months after Temptation Island, Kay gave her ex-boyfriend “another shot.” Now she’s talking to someone new, but it’s casual. Thanks to her time in the experiment, she’s being more intentional about finding a partner who shares her core values. “Moving forward, it’s going to take a lot more to get me invested in a relationship, because I loved talking about those things with Tyler,” she explains. Kay has also learned how important it is to be present when getting to know someone new and how much closer you can get without distractions. “We had no phones, so all we did was talk, talk, talk every day, all day.”
Danny
STATUS: SINGLE
Danny and Ashley may not have dated after leaving the island hand in hand, but he’s still very much in her corner. “We ended up gaining a pretty cool story and connection, and we’re still really good friends,” he tells Tudum. Back home, Danny started a new job in direct sales that was physically and mentally demanding, so navigating a long-distance relationship just wasn’t going to work.
Since then, working, finishing school, and traveling have kept him busy, which means putting his dating life on the back burner. “It’s just ultimately up to timing,” he says. “When the right girl does come around, at the right time in my life and the right time in her life, I think that’s when it’ll be possible to start dating.” When that happens, Danny plans to be the same supportive guy he’s always been. “I like to make people feel good, especially in a situation where I know I can help them,” he says. Now, though, he’ll approach relationships with a stronger sense of adventure. Temptation Island showed Danny that “super unique” dates help build strong connections. “I feel like doing things outside the box brings people together.”
Natalie
STATUS: SINGLE
When Natalie returned home, she didn’t expect her relationship with Grant to go anywhere — until he invited her to join him on a work trip about a week later. “We had the best time. I was kind of surprised,” Natalie says. Then Grant made a grand gesture as they were parting ways. “He chased me down in the airport and made it this whole extravagant thing — which I’m sure you can picture from Grant — and was like, ‘I want to dive into this with you. Let’s be exclusive.’ ” Since the trip went so well, she was game. But when Ashley soon came back into the picture, Natalie realized, she’d been played. “He ended up getting back together with Ashley, which I was honestly kind of expecting just because he is so back and forth,” she explains. “I’m very straightforward. If you’re going to do something to disrespect me in any way, I’ll just never speak to you again.” And she didn’t.
Looking back, Natalie believes that Grant took note of everything she said she was looking for in a partner and then tried — or, perhaps, pretended — to be those things. Despite receiving numerous texts, voice memos, FaceTimes, social media follow requests, and even a four-minute apology video from Grant, Natalie’s not losing sleep over their break-up. “I haven’t even shed a tear over this,” she says. “I’m not distraught whatsoever.” Still, because she did get close with Grant on the island, Natalie wishes the two were on slightly better terms so they could share a few laughs. “But I think it’s just better that we don’t ever talk again,” she says. Lately, Natalie has been single and thriving. “I’m just having fun, doing me, living life.”
